Chapter 1

The gray walls of the ship reverberated with the bursting shell. Her soul shuddered within as her eyes darted from the operating table before her to the walls and low ceiling but there was nothing to see. The relentless bombing made her want to run but where could she go? The hospital ship was only so long and so wide and once the railing was reached, then what? Jump into the open waters of the sea, two decks below?
Outside must be worse but then how much worse could it be? The resolute silent doctor at her side continued to operate as if nothing unusual was happening. She tried to take a small step sideways while handing the requested instruments to him but her feet stuck to the floor. She looked down at all the red around her white shoes as the next shell burst, blasting a fiery hole to the left above them. This time she screamed but no sound could be heard above the battle that raged outside. With the next blast, the doctor fell, the patient rolled and she was knocked her off her feet. She struggled to stand, determined to run this time, but instead she turned to cover her patient tenderly with a sheet. His face was pale and he no longer appeared to be breathing. For some ridiculous reason, she took the time to straighten his identification, his dog tags as the other sailors liked to call them, and noticed once again the Star of David above his name. Another explosion and someone grabbed her, shoving her toward the now open hatch.
“Everybody out!” She heard a gruff military bark over the continuous roar. “Move, move, move!” She stumbled out into the soft night air under the cover of an ink-black sky dotted with millions of pinpoint stars. All around, there was rushing, pushing, screaming, cursing and yet somewhere behind her, she overheard a husky voice reciting a Catholic prayer in the midst of the bedlam. One more blast made her heart recoil as her feet left the deck.
So this is what it feels like to fly, came the strange notion as her mind whirled separately from her body. How calm, how unexpected after all the chaos on deck. Then came the shock of the water. It was a hard hit but warmer than she expected and salty. As a girl from the Ozarks she still couldn’t get used to the idea of water that tasted of salt. If she could just float away, float away from all of it, but the need to breathe took away the power to think of anything else, and she fought her way to the surface. Once there, a fire roared high into the velvet night on the ship behind. Flames fed by the patches of oil on the water licked the surface all around her. The acrid smoke filled her lungs along with the salty water that burned her throat. She fought for breath as well as a path through the insanity that surrounded her on all sides. Men and a handful of women who just a few moments before had been as normal as any she’d ever known had suddenly been transformed into floundering, fighting, sinking, drowning maniacs. Panic set in as she whirled about looking for the way out and then just as suddenly, she was being pulled further and further away from the grotesque scene…

Esther Darling awoke with a start and lay perfectly still in the cozy loft bed of her childhood home. It was quiet here--dry, safe, and warm as she lay nestled beneath a worn family quilt on a day in the late spring of 1946. A peek out the tiny window her father had crafted into the wall before she was born revealed the fading stars as the dawn’s early light spread along the eastern edge of the Ozark hills surrounding the valley of Bennett Spring.
The youngest child of Zeb and Hannah Darling sat up and quickly shed her long cotton gown in exchange for a pair of dungarees and a button-up-the-front shirt. Esther Darling slid down the ladder as she had ever since she was big enough to climb those same well-worn wooden rungs. Tiptoeing out the front door so she would not wake her parents, she slipped along the rocky path, still swathed in morning mists that danced across the surface of the spring branch. She found a seat on a tree stump on the west side of the deep blue-green stream and settled in to watch the gentle ripples of the sparkling waters as they were transformed with the rising sun into pure liquid gold.
This was the best answer Esther had found to the nightmare ravages of war in the South Pacific. The peace of Bennett Spring, the peace of home. The Navy had sent her to a hospital in Guam after the ship on which she was serving had been damaged in a Japanese bombing attack. She had suffered superficial burns over much of her body, but the doctors there had marveled at her lack of serious physical injuries. Her burns healed quickly and she was re-assigned to work at a San Diego hospital afterwards. Despite all that she had been through, she had walked away with little in the way of physical injuries. Still, she found herself wondering if life would ever be the same as before the war. More importantly, would she?
As the sun climbed higher in the morning sky, she continued down the narrow path toward the trout hatchery located in the center of Bennett Spring State Park. The last vestiges of the delicate redbud blossoms clung to thin tree limbs while the majority lay scattered on the forest floor. In their place, white dogwood blossoms had exploded over the local hillsides in recent days, late this season, nearly the first week of May. Bright yellow forsythia bushes hung over gold drops known as buttercups sprinkled with violets and other unnamed wild flowers that all poked their heads through the leaf litter of the last season. Her beloved Ozarks was awash in flowers and lush spring greenery and it embraced her heart in a way that nothing else could.